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Sdna St. %)incent <i^illay : Singer 
®y Qarl Van T>oren 

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Touth and Wings 

Edna St, "Vincent <^J}(Cillay: Singer 
Sy Qarl X)an T)oren 

Reprinted by permission of the author from "Many Minds", Alfred KnoPf 

w i HE little renaissance of poetry which there have been a 
i hundred historians to scent and chronicle in the United States 
during the last decade, flushed to a dawn in i9iz. In that year 
was founded a magazine for the sole purpose of helping poems into 
the world; in that year was published an anthology which meant to 
become an annual, though, as it happened, another annual by an- 
other editor took its place the year following. The real poetical 
event of 1912., however, was the appearance in The Lyric Year, 
tentative anthology, of the first outstanding poem by Edna St. Vin- 
cent Millay. Who that then had any taste of which he can now be 
proud but remembers the discovery, among the numerous failures 
and very innumerous successes which made up the volume, of 
Kenascence, by a girl of twenty whose name none but her friends 
and a lucky critic or two had heard? After wading through tens 
and dozens of rhetorical strophes and moral stanzas, it was like 
suddenly finding wings to come upon these lines: 

"All I could see from where I stood 

Was three long mountains and a wood; 

I turned and looked another way, 

And saw three islands in a bay. 

So with my eyes I traced the line 

Of the horizon, thin and fine. 

Straight around till I was come 

Back to where I'd started from; 

And all I saw from where I stood 

Was three long mountains and a wood." 

The diction was so plain, the arrangement so obvious, that the 
magic of the opening seemed a mystery; and yet the lift and turn of 
these verses were magical, as if a lark had taken to the air out of a 
dreary patch of stubble. 

Nor did the poem falter as it went on. If it had the movement 
of a bird's flight, so had it the ease of a bird's song. The poet of 
this lucid voice had gone through a radiant experience. She had, 

•4 1 >• 




IIAP7Z. 






^^ao^ 



The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay 

she said with mystical directness, felt that she could touch the 
horizon, and found that she could touch the sky. Then infinity 
had settled down upon her till she could hear 

"The ticking of Eternity." 

The universe pressed close and crushed her, oppressing her with 
omniscience and omnisentience; all sin, all remorse, all suffering, 
all punishment, all pity poured into her, torturing her. The 
weight drove her into the cool earth, where she lay buried, but 
happy, under the falling rain. Suddenly came over her the terrible 
memory of the "multi-colored, multiform, beloved" beauty she 
had lost by this comfortable death. She burst into a prayer so 
potent that the responding rain, gathering in a black wave, opened 
the earth above her and set her free. Whereupon, somewhat 
quaintyly, she moralized her experience with the pride of youth 
finally arrived at full stature in the world. 

Renascence, one of the loveliest of American poems, was an 
adventure, not an allegory, but it sounds almost allegorical because 
of the way it interpreted and distilled the temper which, after a 
long drought, was coming into American verse. Youth was dis- 
covering a new world, or thought it was. It had taken upon 
itself burdens of speculation, of responsibility, and had sunk under 
the weight. Now, on fire with beauty, it returned to joy and song. 

Other things than joy and song, however, cut across the track 
of this little renaissance. There was a war. Youth — at least that 
part of it which makes poems — went out to fight, first with passion 
for the cause and then with contempt for the dotards who had 
botched and bungled. Gray Tyrtaeuses might drone that here was 
a good war designed to end war, but youth meantime saw that it 
was dying in hordes and tried to snatch what ecstasy it could 
before the time should come when there would be no more ecstasy. 
Boys and girls who would otherwise have followed the smooth 
paths of their elders now questioned them and turned aside into 
different paths of life. Young men and maidens who would other- 
wise have expected little of love for years to come now demanded 
all that love offers, and demanded it immediately for fear it might 
come too late. The planet was reeling, or looked to be; all the 

■4 3 >• 



The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay 



settled orders were straining and breaking. Amid the hurly- 
burly of argument and challenge and recrimination a lyric had a 
good chance to be unheard; yet it was a lyrical hour, as it always 
is when the poet sees himself surrounded by swift moments hurry- 
ing to an end. Some sense of this in the air, even amid the hurly- 
burly, gave to the youth of the time that rash, impatient, wild 
ardor and insolence and cynicism which followed in such fleet 
succession, growing sharper as the war which was to have been 
good turned into the peace which was bound to be bad. 

Miss Millay's Aria da Capo, like Renascenck, has an al- 
legorical sound, because it lays its finger so surely upon the mad 
sickness of the race during those futile years. The little play, now 
dainty with artifice and now racy with slang and satire, opens 
with Columbine and Pierrot skylarking in their pretty fashion, 
using, however, words with two sharp edges to each of them. 
But they are driven from the stage by tragedy, which sets the 
friendly shepherds Thyrsis and Corydon to playing a scene in which 
they divide their mimic field with colored ribbons, which they call 
a wall, find one of them mimic water on his side and the other 
mimic jewels, move on to a conflict which they did not mean or 
want and which they see is hardly so much reality as senseless act- 
ing, and in the end kill each other across the barrier, dying in 
each other's arms. Back come Pierrot and Columbine to resume, 
only a little disturbed by the dead bodies lying under their feet, 
the happy farce. Love among the ruins! Butterflies above the 
battle! Such folly as had been acted by the nations, the play 
hints, belongs rather to the painted theater than to the solid earth. 
There is not enough wisdom to understand it; there was not enough 
tears to bewail it. It may be better to frolic and forget. 

The decade since the little renaissance began has created a kind 
of symbol for this irresponsible mood in the more or less mythical 
Greenwich Village, where, according to the popular legend, art and 
mirth flourish without a care, far from the stupid duties of human 
life. No one so well as Miss Millay has spoken with the accents 
credited to the village. 

■4 4 J5- 



The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay 



"My candle burns at both ends; 
It will not last the night; 
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — 
It gives a lovely light!" 

Thus she commences in A Few Figs from Thistles. And she 
continues with impish songs and rakish ballads and sonnets which 
laugh at the love which throbs through them. Suckling was not 
more insouciant than she is in Thursday: 

"And if I loved you Wednesday, 
Well, what is that to you? 
I do not love you Thursday — 
So much is true. 

And why you come complaining 

Is more than I can see. 

I loved you Wednesday — yes — but what 

Is that to me?" 

This tincture of diablerie appears again and again in Miss 
Millay' s verse, perhaps most of all in the candor with which she 
talks of love. She has put by the mask under which other poets 
who were women, apparently afraid for the reputation of their 
sex, have spoken as if they were men. She has put by the posture 
of fidelity which women in poetry have been expected to assume. 
She speaks with the voice of women who, like men, are thrilled 
by the beauty of their lovers and are stung by desire; who know, 
however, that love does not always vibrate at its first high pitch, 
and so, too faithful to love to insist upon clinging to what has 
become half-love merely, let go without desperation. A woman 
may be fickle for fun. Miss Millay suggests in various poems wherein 
this or that girl teases her lover with the threat to leave him or the 
claim that she has forgotten him; but so may a woman show wis- 
dom by admitting the variability and transience of love. 

What sets Miss Millay's love-poems apart from almost all those 
written in English by women is the full pulse which, in spite of 
their gay impudence, beats through them. She does not speak 
in the name of forlorn maidens or of wives bereft, but in the name of 
women who dare to take love at the flood, if it offers, and who 
later, if it has passed, remember with exultation that they had what 

< 5 > 



The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay 



no coward could have had. Conscience does not trouble them, nor 
any serious division in their natures. No one of them weeps because 
she has been a wanton, no one of them because she has been be- 
trayed. Rarely since Sappho has a woman written as bravely as 
this 

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, 

I have for^j;otten, and what arms have lain 

Under my head till morning; but the rain 

Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh 

Upon the glass and listen for reply; 

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain 

For unremembered lads that not again 

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry." 

In passages like these Miss Millay has given body and vesture to a 
sense of equality in love; to the demand by women that they be 
allowed to enter the world of adventure and experiment in love 
which men have long inhabited. But Miss Millay does not, like 
any feminist, argue for that equality. She takes it for granted, 
exhibits it in action, and turns it into beauty. 

Beauty, not argument, is, after all, Miss Millay's concern and 
goal. For the most part, she stands with those who love life and 
persons too wholly to spend much passion upon anything abstract. 
She loves the special countenance of every season, the hot light of 
the sun, gardens of flowers with old, fragrant names, the salt smell 
of the sea along her native Maine coast, the sound of sheep-bells and 
dripping eves and the unheard sound of city trees, the homely facts 
of houses in which men and women live, tales of quick deeds and 
eager heroisms, the cool, kind love of young girls for one another, 
the color of words, the beat of rhythm. The shining clarity of her 
style does not permit her to work the things she finds beautiful 
into tapestried verse; she will not ask a song to carry more than it 
can carry on the easiest wings; but in all her graver songs and 
sonnets she serves beauty in one way or another. Now she affirms 
her absolute loyalty to beauty; now she hunts it out in unexpected 
places; most frequently of all she buries it with some of the most 
exquisite dirges of her time. 

These returning dirges and elegies and epitaphs are as much 
the natural speech of Miss Millay as is her insolence of joy in the 

-< 6 >• 



The Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay 



visible and tangible world. Like all those who most love life 
and beauty, she understands that both are brief and mortal. They 
take her round and round in a passionate circle: because she loves 
them so ardently she knows they cannot last, and because she 
knows they cannot last she loves them the more ardently while 
they do. Dispositions such as hers give themselves to joy when 
their vitality is at its peak; in their lower hours they weep over the 
graves of loveliness which are bound to crowd their courses. Hav- 
ing a high heart and a proud creed, Miss Millay leaves unwept 
some graves which other poets and most people water abundantly, 
but she is stabbed by the essential tragedy and pity of death. Thus 
the expresses the tragic powerlessness of those who live to hold 
shose who die: 

"Nor shall my love avail you in your hour. 
In spite of all my love, you will arise 
Upon that day and wander down the air 
Obscurely as the unattended flower, 
It mattering not how beautiful you were. 
Or how beloved above all else that dies." 

Thus she expresses the pitiful knowledge which the living have 
that they cannot help the dead: 

"Be to her, Persephone, 
All the things I might not be; 
Take her head upon your knee. 
She that was so proud and wild. 
Flippant, arrogant and free. 
She that had no need of me. 
Is a little lonely child 
Lost in Hell, — Persephone, 
Take her head upon your knee; 
Say to her, 'My dear, my dear, 
It is not so dreadful here.' 

Are these only the accents of a minor poet, crying over withered 
roses and melted snows? Very rarely do minor poets strike such 
moving chords upon such universal strings. Still more rarely do 
merely minor poets have so much power over tragedy and pity, 
and yet in other hours have equal power over fire and laughter. 



•cj 7}fl- 



The T^oetry and T^lays oj 
cdna Sf. %J in cent <^J}(tillay 



<X1> 



The Hatp Weaver and Other Poems 

The title poem of this volume was awarded the Pulitzer 
Prize for poetry in 191^. John Weaver of the Brooklyn Daily 
Eagle calls it "far and away the finest book of poems of 19x3 — 
yes, and of many other years too." There is a mingling of 
Shakespeareanism and of her own individual lyricism which 
makes these poems fluid, rippling, beautiful." 

$z.oo 

A Few Figs from Thistles 

Oneof her earlier and best loved volumes. "Weir Vernon 
in the N^w York Tribune says of her: "Everything she writes 
is invested with an early-morning surprise. She has a way- 
ward, faery quality, and, more than any other American poet, 
a certain kind of magnificence." 

$1.50 

The Lamp and the Bell 

"Miss Millay has succeeded where so many writers have 
failed. She has written a Shakespearean play that is fresh 
and vigorous, with a humor that is her own and lines that 
are memorable in her own fashion." The Literary Review. 

$1.50 

Aria Da Capo 

A PLAY IN ONE ACT, WITH THE AUTHOR'S 
SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS PRODUCTION 

At the time of its production by the Provincetown Players, 

Alexander Woolcott, in an enthusiastic review in the New 

York Times, said of it: "This bitterly ironic little fantasy is 

the most beautiful and interesting play in the English language 

now to be seen in New York." 

$i.oo 

•48 >. 




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